Wednesday, 22 July 2015

Llyn Celyn

The march of "progress" has trampled over many
people and places on its relentless and rarely-questioned journey. One of these
is the most infamous event in the modern history of Wales,
but is almost unheard of beyond its borders. In 1956 the Westminster Parliament
read a private members bill introduced by Liverpool City Council for the
construction of a reservoir to bring more water into the city for domestic and
industrial use. The government passed the bill and drew up plans to build it in
the lower Tryweryn valley in Gwynedd, Wales.
The new reservoir would be two miles across, a hundred and forty feet deep and
have a capacity of eighteen billion gallons of water. It also has a
hydroelectricity power station able to generate 4.38 megawatts. There was just
one problem; there was a village in the valley. It was called Capel Celyn and
was home to sixty-seven people. The village was also famous as a stronghold of
traditional Welsh culture. It had a unique Quaker cemetery and was completely
Welsh-speaking; some of the residents being among the last monoglots- those who
couldn't speak English. This was at a time when the Welsh language was in
decline and was disenfranchised from most of officialdom. There were genuine
and justified fears that it would become extinct like so many other languages
have. Happily this never happened and today Welsh is thriving, but in those
days most Welsh commentators were very pessimistic about the future of their
tongue. The Capel Celyn residents protested; the photograph below is of the
Tryweryn Defence Committee marching in London.
All but one of the Welsh MP's in Parliament voted against the bill, and even
the odd one out was an abstention not a Yes. The water from the reservoir does
not feed any part of Wales
and is pumped straight to Liverpool and the Wirral.

Construction on the dam began in 1960 and in 1965 the river
Tryweryn was diverted into the new reservoir. Capel Celyn's houses, the school,
the farms, the famous chapel and cemetery, and over eight hundred acres of land
were permanently inundated. The villagers started a riot and somebody even
planted a bomb at the pumping station. The police moved in to crush the
demonstration and the former residents had no choice but to watch as their old
homes were covered forever by the grey lapping water. When dealing with the
cemetery the government offered the villagers a choice; they could leave the
bodies of their departed in the ground or they could exhume them and rebury
them in new graves on dry land. Eight chose the latter. The government promised
to preserve the cemetery by covering it in gravel and concrete, but as these
divers' pictures show, this promise was broken, see: http://thepostmortempost.com/2015/07/13/the-underwater-graveyards-of-tryweryn-valley-wales/
(Thanks to Scott Felton for finding this). The images are stills from this
heart-rending clip of a BBC documentary called The Celts; Enya produced the soundtrack for it, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gmpjm.
The track is called Dan y Dwr-
"under the water". The destruction of Capel Celyn has also inspired
songs by Welsh musicians like the Manic Street Preachers and Los Campesinos!. I
myself include a reference to the tragedy of Llyn Celyn in my first and somewhat
lesser novel Evan's Land, see here
about a third of the way through: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/evans-land-audio-book.html.
The story has also become a rallying call for Welsh nationalist and civil
rights activists. Plaid Cymru membership soared as a result. The graffiti
slogan Cofiwch Dryweryn!-
"remember Tryweryn!" can be seen throughout Wales
to this day. The reservoir was solemnly christened Llyn Celyn- "holly
lake", and that name has a very dark cultural potency in Wales.
To Welsh ears it echoes similarly to "the Holocaust", "the
Blitz" or "the Somme". Unsurprisingly and
correctly, Llyn Celyn is regarded as a national and cultural issue in Wales,
but it is not the only example and perhaps other similar incidents deserve
recognition too. I think all villages are cultural treasures wherever they are.
Grafham Water in Cambridgeshire was created at about the same time as Llyn
Celyn and is of a similar size and design. A village was also drowned to make
that. In fact I know somebody who lives near there who realized that the
propaganda about the drought of 2013 was a lie because Grafham Water was full
to the brim the whole time. She knows when the water level gets low because the
steeple of the old church in the village protrudes above the surface.
Presumably the people who lived in that village had to face a similar ordeal to
those who lived in Capel Celyn.

For me the destruction of Capel Celyn is not only an
inexcusable and indefensible atrocity, it was completely avoidable. This is because
the commodities for which it was falsely justified can be obtained so easily in
other ways; this makes the affair all the more poignant. The other ways are
those that the authorities in this world won't allow the people access to; they
covet and conceal them in their own secret activities. I'm talking here about
free energy and antigravity. If everybody had use of those technologies there
would be no need to flood villages to build reservoirs. In fact it would be
unnecessary to plunder any of Earth's freshwater at all; we could take as much
as we needed from the sea, where there is a virtually infinite supply. With
free energy we could desalinate it and transport it to wherever it was needed,
for almost no cost. This would mitigate the impact of droughts, like the one
currently raging in California,
because of the ease with which water could be taken from the oceans and made
available for drinking and irrigation. This would of course remove most threats
of famine too, because such disasters are usually caused by drought destroying
farmland. See background links below for more details. Maybe a day will come
when Llyn Celyn can be drained and the dam demolished. The land can be dried
out and maybe some of the old buildings repaired from their decades of
saturation. Will people one day return to live in Capel Celyn? I hope so, and
if it happens I want to be there to see it.

.

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